Plastic: The Mass Murderer That Gets Away

The Executive Director Dr. Richard Bailey is very concerned about them. He said that  many animals live on the bottom of the Lake and the waterlogged bags will sink and be a real danger to the marine life. The food sources for shrimp, shellfish and sponges are at the bottom of the lake and the plastic bags covering that food up, effectively preventing the animal from eating, maybe even eventually eradicating the animal.

Within one hour, shopping bags, zip-lock bags, a football, candy wrappers,cigarette butt’s and other plastic pieces are recovered and bagged for proper disposal.
There is lots more where that came from, said Bailey. It is a small drop in a big bucket, but it is a start to keep the lake clean.

It’s not only where they end up, but also there is no end to them . Every piece of plastic ever made, except the ones that get incinerated and pose a treat of poisoning, is still around and persistently showing up in our live. Be it in our environment or in our food chain. Plastic breaks down an small pieces and fish eat it for plankton or a tasty morsel of jelly fish. We eat the fish and with the fish we eat tiny parts of plastic.

Every bag you take out of the grocery store will exist a lot longer the you will live. We slowly but surely plastic coating our earth and plant material will not grow. What are we going to eat?

San Francisco’s ultra modern recycling facility processes 700 tons of recycle material’s annually. Anything from tuna cans, beer bottles, card board boxes to plastic detergent bottles and wood pieces. The city diverts 69 percent of the waste from landfills and ship’s it to recycling factories. They have 16 categories of recycle material and plastic shopping bags is not in any one of them. They are trucked to the regular dump and then end up in the ground to sit there.

It is not practical for the small store to stockpile large amounts of returned bags and then sell them to the recycling companies or plastic brokers. Bigger chain do have a system in place to do that. There are only a few recycling companies that accept plastic bags here in the U.S.

The Trex Company out of Winchester Virginia, uses Plastic bags to combine with recycled wood and make composite decking. They use half of the offered bags in the U.S. About 1,5 billion bags, per year. It takes 2,250 bags to make one 2×6 inch 16 foot plank.  However, this is not seen as true recycling. This is considered to down cycle into something that will not be able to be recycled again.
To recycle plastic bags back into plastic bags would far out weight the cost of new ones made, so therefore it is not economically sound to do that. However the long-term cost of making billions of new plastic bags is staggering.

To go back to paper bags is not a solution either. It takes 13 million trees to produce the 10 billion bags that are used annually.

The only sensible solution for this dilemma would be to bring your own reusable bag and decline the use of any store bags. Next time a bagger ask you: Paper or plastic, whip out you cloth bag and smile at him or her.